WTF

Thursday, Sept. 30, 2021, will be remembered as a dark, devastating day for women’s soccer in the U.S.

MADRID - Barcelona's 17-year-old midfielder Gavi has been handed a surprise call up by Spain coach Luis Enrique for the Nations League Final Four tournament in Italy next month.

Gavi, who has only featured for Spain at junior levels previously and turned 17 in August, has made just two LaLiga starts for the Catalans this term. However, he has done enough across his six appearances in all competitions to impress Luis Enrique and earn a spot in the 23-man squad.

It's fair to say Barcelona's announcement of the signing of Luuk de Jong was met with skepticism and surprise. The fact that he was brought in specifically in line with the wishes of Ronald Koeman, with whom the Barça faithful's patience is wearing thin, can not have helped his cause. It also didn't help that he was brought in to ease the sting of Lionel Messi's departure, something which was never going to be easy.

MADRID — When Moldovan minnows Sheriff Tiraspol qualified for the elite Champions League, becoming the first side from that country to do so, pundits were scratching their heads and asking 'who?'.

Then, when they were drawn in a group with Real Madrid, Inter Milan and Shakhtar Donetsk, it was thought by pundits to be a case of how many goals they would lose by.

If you’re like most of the football world on Tuesday, you were focused on the battle between the world’s two richest sides, PSG and Manchester City. As sad as Bernardo Silva was after his miss in that match, there was no one sadder on Tuesday than Diogo Costa, the Porto goalkeeper who was caught disastrously out of position by Roberto Firmino.

Manchester City looked like a world beater in its first Champions League match of the season, the type of team that can score at will, whenever it wants. Match Day 2 was a different story for Pep Guardiola’s side, and the Bernardo Silva miss vs PSG may haunt the Citizens if they’re unable to claim first place in Group A.

I heard once, I can’t remember from where, that the greatest measure of your time remaining on this planet was in how many more World Cups you could reasonably expect to witness before death. Instead of saying “I am 30,” you could say “I hope to see 12 more World Cups.”

That struck me as a reasonable philosophy. 

Birthdays start to come and go with an increasing desire to make less of what starts to seem like a doomsday countdown, but the World Cup — with its quadrennial rarity — stands out as a month-long celebration of the best of our outward reality.